Loading...It’s funny how emotions work. I mean you’re cruising along thinking that you’re pretty confident in your feelings about something and then things change, suddenly you start to get all wistful over a place you were pretty sure you didn’t like. OK, let me now substitute “I” for “you” in those sentences above. Let me own my contradictions.
When we moved to LA in October 2001, I had never been here. Well, I had been to Disneyland when I was 4, but I don’t really think Tomorrowland counts. There are things I like about LA. The quality of life here is better than NY, it was easier to carve out a nice little existence for ourselves in this sprawling mega-urb than we ever could on the tiny island of Manhattan. And that’s nice. Professionally, who can complain? Six years ago I got a temp job in an HR department in a bank and now I’m an HR Manager making 3x my salary when I left NY. OK, so what’s the problem?
I don’t like it here, don’t like the people, don’t like the game. It’s complicated and I even wrote a novel about it, maybe it’ll even be published one day. And yet, when my brother came out to visit us for my birthday last month I found myself getting all nostalgic. We drove up to Solvang to wine taste and I was getting misty eyed over Danish pancakes. I tried to employ my Venice Italy strategy: never think that you’re never coming back. But wait, do I really care if I never come back? What’s going on?
And now, my college roommate is coming to visit at the end of August and the best thing I can come up with to do is go to San Francisco. So maybe I don’t really like LA after all. I suppose now is the time to close that Danish pancake eating chapter of my life. There are many other kinds of pancakes out there. Did it matter that these pancakes happen to be near LA? Could they be anywhere and I’m just missing the tradition? That’s probably it. I’m sure that’s it. It most definitely can’t be LA I’m missing.
